Monday, December 17, 2012

For more than a half century, Luis La Rosa and Harry Henry have left their homes before dawn each workday in the communist-run city of Guantánamo, where old American cars rumble past posters of the Castro brothers in a Cold War time warp, climbed into taxis and traveled to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, where troops shop at a Wal-Mart-like store and eat at McDonald's and Subway.

The commute takes less than an hour but spans two worlds and a heavily guarded border fence.

Now it is coming to an end. La Rosa, a 79-year-old welder who works at the base's motor pool, and Henry, an 82-year-old office worker, are retiring at the end of the month. They were honored Friday at a retirement ceremony.

The close friends, who have a kind of celebrity status on the base, are the last of what were once hundreds of Cubans commuting daily to work at this isolated U.S. military installation.

For them, it is a bittersweet moment - a severing of one of the last real links between Cuba and the U.S. Navy base that has been an unwelcome presence on the island for generations.